CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Civil Disobedience Can Be Justified In a Democracy

Civil Disobedience Can Be Justified In a Democracy

Introduction

Until the sixties of the twentieth century, the term "civil disobedience" got used very little and sporadically in the European cultural sphere. Before that time, people got considered disobedient insumisas resistant or against the laws and preferred states defined as revolutionary as rebels or other similar words. The reception of the works of Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi, in which appears the concept of civil disobedience, was so far very limited compared with the dissemination of the writings of other authors who advocated the right of resistance against tyranny, the legitimacy of the national liberation of colonial peoples by force of arms, the social revolution or even the abolition of the states.

Exceptions to this situation would indicate some texts that mention the civil disobedience in the context of pacifism and militarism during the years of promotion and consolidation of national-socialism. There are, for example, some explicit references to the concept of civil disobedience in the works of two of the most notable of the century, Einstein and Russell. As I say, these examples were rare in the context of Western European political philosophy. Be stopped only when, from the sixties, spreads in the United States the struggle for black civil rights, inspired by Martin Luther King, and protest against the war in Vietnam.

Discussion

The success in recent years has reached the term "civil disobedience" has much to do with the widespread awareness of the decline of the revolutions in the West and the perception, too widespread, the failure of most societies emerging from revolutionary movements of the twentieth century. Still in the seventies, when they begin to gel the modernist alternative social movements (feminism, environmentalism and pacifism), the term "civil disobedience" had a limited circulation outside of the avant-garde, in many European countries, rose against the danger of a new world war fought with nuclear weapons. It is precisely through the peace movement and anti-militarist, which reached its highest development in the eighties, as the phrase "uncivil disobedience" gained popularity in public opinion (Markovits, 2005).

In the case of Einstein, who was a civic-minded scientist, civil disobedience got presented in the interwar years as a moral appeal against Prussian militarism and racism that inspired the rise of National Socialism in Germany and, later. In the early years of the Cold War as a protest against what he called "naked power" in the era of McCarthyism in the U.S. Even in the case of Luther King, who has been the symbol of civil disobedience to passionate segments of contemporary pacifism, it appears mainly as a way of drawing the attention of the authorities and public opinion to the then existing discrimination towards the black minority in America (Mandela, 1994).

Gandhi, however, civil disobedience has been theorized, first in South Africa (1893-1914) talking to the old Tolstoy, and then, independently, from an ethical-political dimension, that is, discussing the means-end support of revolutionary violence in the struggle for national liberation and arguing, ...